palette knife painting – Humoring the Goddess

Artist Raymond Logan paints a wide range of subjects with exquisite depth and color. His layered palette resembles sculpture, crafted of hue and shadow.

The works have reverence and gravitas, coupled with a lively playfulness, born of both the artist’s execution and the connections he evokes between the viewer and the subject.

While each portrait is often recognizable, they are not realistic in the truest sense of the word.

It is as if an explosion of colored confetti had descended from the sky and reshaped itself into the personification of a human being.

Created in oil paint, using both palette knife and brush, all the elements are there, but it is those many disparate pieces that form a realistic whole.

“My work is born through solid draftsmanship plus a liberal application of paint via a brush or a knife or anything I can get my hands on, plus plenty of color experimentation and the carving of my medium,” Logan explains.

“It is truly gratifying when a viewer, while being up close to my work, stares in wonder at the surface, then, while backing away, witnesses all that texture and color (that an art textbook tells them shouldn’t work) and abstraction somehow mysteriously develop into a recognizable subject.”

“That ‘somehow’ is me.”

More of Raymond Logan’s wonderful paintings can be found at http://www.raymondlogan.com/.

Iranian painter Salman Khoshroo uses a palette knife and sizable layers of paint to create the emotive portraits in his recent series, “White on White.”In contrast to his previous work that relied on swirling reds, blues, and yellows, Khoshroo’s latest impasto pieces are monochromatic.Starting with a hunk of paint, the artist then forms the portrait’s outline before shaping the rest of the face that lacks distinct physical features.Viewers can follow his creative process step-by-step by looking at the edges of each stroke.Khoshroo hopes to capture a human spark with minimal intervention and create portraits of people that make you feel something, people you didn’t even know you were looking for.Painted with a single pigment in a sandbox method, these faces are the result of taking a chunk of paint and molding it.It is amazing that one can see so many features in such few movements.